How unemployed Californians launched new careers in a pandemic with 9 weeks of training
The Sacramento Bee is exploring the future of work in California as the state recovers from the coronavirus pandemic. The series is supported by the Solutions Journalism Network, a nonprofit organization dedicated to rigorous and compelling reporting about responses to social problems.
Unemployment helped Rey Justo achieve his dream.
In April, Justo lost his job working as an appliance installer making $20 an hour, the highest paying work he has ever had. By fall, he and his family of six were living between a Honda Pilot and his in-law’s living room.
It was then he read an e-mail about Sacramento’s program to pay residents $600 a week for nine weeks while they trained for such digital jobs as data analyst and technical support specialist.
He had always dreamed of working in technology, but never had the time or resources to learn. This time, though, his unemployment was about to run out. He desperately needed a job.
After three months in the program, Justo is now working at tech consultant Zennify, where he will become a software developer after three more months of on-the-job training. He could make as much as $15,000 more annually than he did in the job he lost and eventually earn a six-figure salary.
“I’m seeing myself for the first time ever as so successful,” said Justo, 32 of Sacramento.
Sacramento spent $10 million it received from a federal coronavirus relief law to launch short-term job training programs in several industries, from manufacturing to technology, aiming to boost the city’s struggling workforce quickly.
Justo launched his new career through Digital Upskill Sacramento, a partnership among several organizations that received $800,000 from the city. The program paid 40 residents like Justo, from disadvantaged communities, to march through a boot camp for a job in a new, higher-paying industry.
Not everything went swimmingly. Some said they wanted more time than nine weeks, and it’s not certain whether the participants will succeed in their new jobs. But so far, nine participants have gotten job offers days after their “graduation” from the program, making substantially more than they earned in their previous positions. More are expected to get offers soon.
Now, some officials say they want programs like this to scale up, becoming an established part of how the region prepares its residents for the future of work.
“This is an opportunity to recreate, reimagine, think a little bit out of the box,” said Cassandra Jennings, the president and CEO of the Greater Sacramento Urban League. “It’s an investment. It’s not risk.”
Training workers for digital jobs
A 2018 report from the Brookings Institute found that by 2016, nearly a quarter of jobs in Greater Sacramento required high levels of digital skills, nearly a fourfold increase from 2002.
But the Greater Sacramento Economic Council wasn’t sure how to get the community and its workforce interested in training for digital jobs, said Barry Broome, the president and CEO of the organization founded by a group of CEOs throughout the region.
Then the pandemic left more than 150,000 people in the region suddenly unemployed.
“This was an aspiration prior to COVID, and after COVID, it became a necessity,” Broome said of the Digital Upskill Sacramento Program. “It was more of a crisis thinking.”
The organization created a partnership with the Urban League, as well as Merit America and General Assembly, two organizations offering credentials in digital skills such as data analytics.
Although Sacramento had not funded programs like this before, city officials said the proposal matched their goal: Creating jobs in growing industries for workers laid off from sectors that may have lost jobs for good.
“The great debate in our city is whether the city should invest directly in the economic future of our neighborhoods and our people,” Mayor Darrell Steinberg said at the program’s graduation ceremony. “This was our signature opportunity to answer that question: Yes.”
Once the project got a green light, officials started accepting applications. They expected a few hundred, but got 5,000.
“Why so many people? Because it was a real opportunity,” Broome said. “We’ll provide you with dignity and real opportunity. They grabbed it, and I thank them for it.”
The partnership picked 40 people, based on their backgrounds as well as an assessment of their basic technology skills, such as Microsoft Excel.
Then, the participants went through nine weeks of training, either through General Assembly for data analytics or through Merit America for software support. The participants also got a weekly training in their job searching skills, from improving their resume to developing their LinkedIn profiles.
Meanwhile, the partnership worked with employers around the region to connect them to the participants.
Zennify was one of the companies contacted by the Greater Sacramento Economic Council, said the company’s CEO, Manvir Sandhu.
Sadnhu said Zennify saw the program as a way to diversify the company’s workforce. The company had already hired more than 30 people who got credentials from organizations such as Merit America and General Assembly, he said.
“Those individuals can be leaders within our organization, and some of them are already leaders in our organization,” Sandhu said. “The sky is the limit.”
What worked?
Government agencies don’t usually pay residents to go through short-term boot camps, despite their rising popularity. As of recently, only two other California cities — San Diego and Oakland — offer similar programs, according to Course Report, which tracks the data.
But even as Broome said his partnership “took a risk and got lucky,” a few things worked in the program’s favor.
First, having the Urban League, an institution in the region’s Black community for more than 50 years, helped the partnership recruit from an underrepresented population.
The Urban League also provided services beyond job training, which proved very helpful for Sacramento mother Sunsarae Jackson, who gave birth to a daughter just five days before she was to start the training.
Jackson, 38, said she knew she could go to the Urban League for help if she needed it, from diapers for her newborn to clothes for her interviews.
Second, the program provided not just free training, but a free laptop, Internet access and a stipend.
“Not having to use my credit card to pay for groceries, because I had the money, that was amazing,” she said. “I didn’t have a reason not to go forward, because they provided me with tools to go forward.”
Sacramento had not given stipends of that size for a workforce development program, but city officials said they recognized many needed the money, especially during the pandemic.
In some cases, with unemployment insurance running out for some, “stipends were the only resource they were getting,” said Kriztina Palone, the city’s workforce development manager.
Finally, the program didn’t just just teach specific tech skills, but also “soft skills,” such as polishing a resume or preparing for a job interview, said Ian Stirgwolt, who worked on the partnership for General Assembly.
In fact, Jackson’s updated LinkedIn profile prompted a recruiter to call her. That led to an offer to work as a technical support specialist for a mortgage company even before she had finished the program.
“Now, I’ve been working since Dec. 21 and I haven’t missed a beat,” Jackson said. “I’m really enjoying it.”
Length of training programs
Jackson still wishes the program was a bit longer. A training program at Merit America goes for 14 weeks or so. But because of the time limit imposed by the federal stimulus, Jackson’s training was condensed to nine weeks.
“For people working full-time already and trying to take the course to get into a higher paying profession, it may be too hectic,” she said.
The program also has some long-term challenges. Among them: Not every company is comfortable with hiring someone who went through a short program compared to someone who got a degree, said Sean Gallagher, a professor at Northeastern University who has been tracking the rise of short-term education programs known as micro-credentials.
Companies may not think of those who went through those programs as qualified — one tech recruiter called them “a freaking joke” a few years ago. Some programs have faced scrutiny for exaggerated job placement numbers.
“Even today, it’s still very new. It’s still very early in employers’ experience,” Gallagher said of those programs. “It has great potential. There’s a lot more foundational work that has to happen.”
And because those programs are new, Gallagher said there is little data to show how people fare years after finishing the programs.
Then there’s the question of how to help not just the 40 who got through Sacramento’s program, but the thousands who applied and didn’t get in.
Those who got into the program probably on average have higher skill levels than those who didn’t, said Roy Kim, deputy director of workforce development at the Sacramento Employment and Training Agency, which has been providing job training for decades in the region. It also received a share of the city’s grant to provide on-the-job training program in industries such as construction and healthcare.
Put another way, how do you help people who don’t know how to use a computer?
Government agencies need to think about those people as well, and that’s what SETA has been thinking about, Kim said.
The future of job training
The city is still evaluating how its $10 million has been spent in different job training programs. Overall, the city funded 29 organizations including the Digital Upskill Sacramento Program, reaching 1,770 residents in total. Of them, 1,423 have completed the formal short-term training processes, Palone said.
The city does not yet have firm data on how many of them have gotten jobs. Because of the pandemic, some employers in industries such as manufacturing are not hiring as many people as expected, Palone said. She said she hopes companies will hire more workers as the economy recovers.
Still, Palone said the city hopes to continue some form of those programs, including in areas such as digital jobs, cybersecurity and healthcare.
Jennings said the last few months has taught the Urban League that it can get people to jobs in high-demand industries quickly. She’s hopeful that more support will come to help the organization continue its effort.
“We don’t want this to be a project,” she said. “We want this to be a program.”
This story was originally published February 2, 2021 at 5:00 AM with the headline "How unemployed Californians launched new careers in a pandemic with 9 weeks of training."
